30 children a day finding themselves alone.

Last Friday, Kasarani children’s office, which covers the area of Mathare, turned up at the Rescue Centre with two five year olds, a six week old and an older baby that they wanted to give us. The government department are in the process of shutting down a children’s home near to us that is so poorly funded and so badly managed that four children have died in the past few months. We begged and pleaded with the Children’s Officer that we could not take the children as Mogra Rescue Centre is overcrowded, broke and does not have the staff or facilities for babies.

They pleaded back and we ended up keeping the older baby. She is called Angel and she is fourteen months old. Her hair had been braided by the older children, but she was covered in sores from untreated nappy rash and the dirt was so ingrained that her skin had become pulled tight and broken. She can’t move, but she has a smile for everyone.

This other children’s home, we shall call it the ‘Silver Shepherd’ was opened by an independent Kenyan church. Initially it had money and support and was doing well, but it lacked any planning and any structure. There were two pastors in charge, one went to the USA to fundraise. He did well at first, so the second pastor went up country to open a second Silver Shepherd Children’s Home in rural Kenya. After a while though, support in the US dried up and the Pastor based out there had to feed himself and support his own family, so he spent more time working and less time fundraising. The other pastor in the countryside was kept very busy with the second project and washed his hands of the first. So the Silver Shepherd Children’s home was run into the ground. Staff weren’t paid and didn’t turn up for work. Nappies didn’t get changed, clothes didn’t get washed and food didn’t get cooked. The four children who died, died of simple infections; they were dirty, malnourished, and never got to see a nurse.

In the meantime Kasarani Children’s Department is kept very busy; it covers Mathare and many other slum areas of Nairobi and has an average of thirty referrals every day. This is 30 children who need residential care, it could be because they are orphaned, abandoned or simply so abused and neglected by their parents that they cannot live at home for their own safety. Often, Tom, the Children’s officer can deal with it ‘informally’; he can find a Mama who will take the child in and care for it whilst they follow up the case. Tom does not know exactly how many Mamas he has like this, but it is in the hundreds. He says that every single person working in their office has at least three rescued children at home; simply there was nowhere else for that child to go at the end of the day.

How easy is it to turn a child away? How does it feel to know that you, yet another adult has failed that child? Silver Shepherd should be a wake up call for us: our children are fed and clothed, yes, but we only have four staff and none have had a break for over two years. We have 132 children, just enough to pay the bills. No spare to employ a nurse, or even for trips to the clinic. And we are still really struggling to implement any structure.

The Children’s Office knows all this, yet they are still calling us about that six week old as the baby has nowhere else to go….

My experience as a volunteer

My friend Alice and I stayed at the Mogra Centre - the home for children that Tushinde has set up - for two weeks during the summer of 2010 (yes this is a shamefully belated blog). Immediately we were made to feel very welcome and all the staff and children were so generous, sharing the little they had.

We spent the majority of our time at the Mogra Centre, helping teach children who were either too little or too poorly to do the long walk to the school. I remember being quite shocked when I first saw the classroom, as it was like a cave with bare cement walls and bits of rubble everywhere. The children sat on old-fashioned benches and shared worn out pencils and battered old textbooks between them. There was one teacher to 30 children of a range of different ages and abilities. A completely different environment to one you would see in any primary school in England. We did a variety of tasks with them; for example one day me and Alice split the class in two and taught the children about the solar system, then another day we gave each child a pack of seeds and went and planted them, for them to try and grow their own crops. I really enjoyed spending time with the children and found that, despite the obvious issues and low standards of equipment and surroundings, after a while you hardly noticed them. All you noticed was what a lovely teacher they have and how keen the children are to learn, and how they love learning almost as much as they love play-time.

After school finished, we played lots of games and sang songs. They all drew pictures, writing ‘I love Grace and Alice’ on all their pictures, and all fought for our attention, jumping on us to hold them and pushing away other children so we could hold only their hands. They clearly yearned for attention and to be loved and this in itself was heartbreaking. Bedtime was a time when it became even more apparent, the completely different lives these children have. There were two year olds running around at nine pm, whilst other children slept on the floor sharing a tiny mattress sodden with urine. Yet without Tushinde, most would not have mattresses at all. We helped establish a teeth cleaning routine (with a very catchy tune we wrote) and then read them stories and sang songs. They loved being stroked to sleep and all gathered around to have stories read to them and asked to be sang to again and again. Sadly Tushinde does not have the staff to be able to do this.

Once the older children came home from school, we also spent some time talking to them. A lot of them really wanted to talk to us about their lives and they were so open about the horrors that they had faced, some almost matter of fact, as if it is an inevitable part of life. Yet this is not the way it should be. It should not be inevitable that a child has to see their parents murdered in front of them, or a little girl has to live on the street pretending to be a boy in order to survive, and that many were raped or abused. At home we are all aware of the struggles many children in Africa face, yet I found that imagining their existence was very different to actually seeing it face to face. At the same time it is evident how strong, determined and hopeful these children still are and this is clearly thanks to Tushinde.

Tushinde helps shape the lives of children whose paths are otherwise pre-determined and has already done this for so many children. For example Monica, the little girl who was living on the streets who disguised herself as a boy in order to avoid being attacked or raped; thanks to Tushinde she is now an A grade student planning to go to law school. When we were there she was reading a book in English (her second language) that I shamefully admit I gave up on the year before as it was too hard!

One particular day, we went to the slums with Megan, to visit the school that Tushinde helps. Seeing the slums was eye opening, the awful conditions that so many people have to live in. Also to see first hand the positive impact Tushinde has had on so many childrens’ education and their health too, by paying for HIV medication or trying to improve their impoverished living arrangements. It was clear to me that Tushinde is trying to help in as many ways as it possibly can.

From my stay, it is evident that Tushinde has already done so much to help change children lives, and that it has so much more potential. Tushinde has done the hard part: it has the passion, the ideas and the right people, it just needs the financial support. And that’s the easy part, and the bit that we all need to help with.

love, Grace

Shem's Garden

No-one in their right mind would want to live in Shem's house: not beacuse he shares the one room with his parents, his three elder brothers, his younger, disabled brother and two cousins. Or beacuse the tin roof has holes in it that let the rain pour in and the mud floor become sticky. Or for that matter, that to get to it, you have to climb down a steep slope, knee deep in rubbish and waste and then through a labyrinth of alleyways. The reason that you wouldn't want to live in Shem's house is that he lives right outside an improvised open sewer that carries the waste of the thousand huts in Mabatini, a slum within Mathare, to the putrid river a few metres away. Someone has built an improvised loo straddling the channel right by their door and when it really rains, the ditch overflows into thier home.

Despite all this. the six year old has planted a garden. He marked off the tiny plot with sticks and old video-tape and then from seed he has grown beans and onions and, most remarkably, flowers.

The thing about Shem is that despite his abject poverty, he has a family that loves him and allows him the freedom of hope. These plants have yet to flower and I hope for Shem's sake they will.

A pile of skin and bones under a blanket.

Samuel did not have the best of starts to life. His mother died when he was six, leaving him under the care of his teenage sister and an alcoholic father who was rarely around. Soon his sister was pregnant and now, four years later, her first born is in school and she is pregnant again.

Growing up with a teenage sister as a mother figure and a drunken father who would disappear for weeks on end, it is not a surprise that no-one noticed the early signs of typhoid. Nor is it a surprise that no-one thought they should spend the 20 shillings (18p) to take Samuel to the clinic to get the simple cure for such a disease.

When Samuel was rushed to hospital with crippling abdominal pains, he was an otherwise happy, healthy kid, working hard at Mogra with many friends and hopes for the future. Six weeks after his first operation to remove the parts of his bowel that had perforated and seven further operations since then, he is nothing but skin and bones, unable to move and unable to talk. He has suffered days of dehydration and starvation as there has not been the money for drugs, or they have not been able to get an IV line in. Due to the infection and repeated surgery, his abdominal wound will no longer close and a surgical dressing is what keeps his intestines inside. He looks like a skeleton and his big brown, sad eyes plead with you when you come into his sight. When Hannah put her hand on the bed, his little skinny hand reached out to her.

His mother's brother sits by his bed day and night, he helps with the basic nursing care, washing him and changing his sheets.

Despite the low conscious level, the continuous oxygen therapy and the absence of any body fat, the doctors feel it is not a completely hopeless case, they say his kidneys are still working (only just) and the liver function tests were OK. They say that what is left of his bowel will be enough to function once the infection has cleared. There are only three nurses on the children's ward for over sixty patients, no-one seemed to know when he had last passed urine or when his IV nutrition was started. He also needs blood, but his group is O negative and it is hard to find.

I am now in the difficult situation of trying to decide if it is worth looking for money to transfer him to a hopsital where he can get good enough care. If his gut does work and his kidneys don't fail then he will probably survive if we act quickly, but we would need at least £10,000 to give him a chance and that amount of money could make a real difference to the rest of the project that helps a thousand children. I just feel so sad for Samuel, who has never had a chance in his life and angry at the injustice in the world that would see a ten year old child die: If his family had had the 20 shillings, none of this would have happened.

Half a Million People Without Water Supply

If there was such a headline in a UK newspaper, there would be uproar. Yet, a town the size of Edinburgh has had no water at all for three weeks. The only difference being that these are the slums of Nairobi and very few people in Kenya seem to care about the poor.

It is a two mile walk from some parts of Mathare to the nearest standpipe where you have to queue for hours by the one tap and then struggle home with as much water as you can possibly carry. In the bumpy streets of Mathare the water sellers struggle to push carts laden with jerry cans. But theirs is a lucrative business, to an almost captive market; The price of a fifteen litre jerry can is 30/=, about 25p. Many households in the slums live on less than a pound a day, so to suddenly have to pay ten times the normal amount for water is crippling. Imagine having to look afer a young family with just 15 litres of water.

With the water shortages has come an edginess to Mathare: the mains supply pipe was broken during the building of a super highway, a mile away, people are angry and growing tired of the situation.

'Why hasn't the government acted more quickly'

' No-one cares about us, they think we are all gangsters and drink changaa' (the local brew).

There is also a strong belief that politicians are friends with the people that drive the large tankers of fresh water who are also making so much profit. Hannah, the director of Mogra says that she would rather buy water off the men pushing the carts than the tankers she is so disgusted by the whole thing. You feel that if it goes on for much longer, there might be serious trouble, which would be tragic for all the kids of Mathare, who are only just recovering from the post-election violence.

So, in a way it has been brilliant that we have started our food programme, even if a lot of the money meant to be for food is having to go on water: the kids are getting food every day of the week and they can't quite believe it. Particularly the meat on Fridays. The next day, they started lining up at 9am! Attendance has rocketed to 99% and our porridge programme, which is served at 7 am, but is optional, has been taken up by every single child.

We hope this will remove the burden for the families of our children, especially in this time when things are tighter than ever. Sad we can't help the other 499,000

Finding a smile and smiling.

Had an impromptu visit to the slums today. Was meant to be going to town to organise registration of Tushinde in Kenya, but got a call from Sgt Sibbald from the British Army saying that he wanted to drop off a load of books that had been sent over for Mogra. So I met Sgt Jeff and Sgt B in the slums and we unloaded 8 or so boxes of lovely books. Really good quality and doubles of quite a few of the new ones, so some will stay in the school and some will go to the children's home. Waiting outside the school were various Mamas needing help. One was Janice's Aunt, who I have written about before. Their situation has become even worse: Janice's uncle has since been badly injured on a building site, where he was working for the daily wage of £1.60. He has lost the use of his right arm and now they are three months behind on the rent and threatened with eviction. The poor Aunt appeared on the brink of tears and was shaking; it turned out she hadn't eaten for four days, trying to scrape some money together to pay the landlord, they owe about £50. I took Jeff and B (Bernice) around to visit some of the communities we help. The lack of rain hasn't helped the general stench of the place and today there were water shortages everywhere, including the school. The kids were bright and chirpy though and poor B was mobbed in the playground with lots of children excited to have someone from the British Army. Jeff and B are willing to help and they have asked me to write them a wish list, which is great news...where do I start?!

Whilst we were talking, back in the school, we were visited by a woman who had two month old twin girls. One was perfect, but the other, Rebecca, had a bad cleft palate deformity. The Mama is HIV positive, we don't yet know the status of the twins. She is a single mum, caring for her own seven year old daughter who has the disease and three children, orphaned when her sister died. She has no job and no money and struggles to feed the children and pay the rent. She got pregnant with the twins as she had resorted to having sex for food, which is so common in the slums. Every day is a struggle, let alone finding help for a baby daughter. So, when I have finished writing this, I will be trawling the internet, looking for an organisation that can help little baby Rebecca. Any suggestions? x x

Back in the slums and it isn't any better.

I have had a busy summer as a mum and haven't really had a chance to do any of the community side of our work. We did, however manage to do some fundraising and two Tushinde events in the UK raised over £3,000 combined. A big thank you to everyone who helped.

The events also generated lots of enthusiasm and interest as well as finding five new sponsors (659 left to be sponsored!).

My break from volunteering in the slums though, had made me less focused and my enthusiasm less fervent. Today I was back though and it only took one house visit to remind me why I care so much.

We are following up children who had scored as 'severely underweight' from our nutritional survey day back in March. It seems that often children go hungry if there are school fees to pay for older children who are at seconday school, but not in Mogra.

Mary is one such child. She is six and a half years old and lives with her parents. They lived in a one roomed house with a bare concrete floor and no furniture; my friend and I were given plastic buckets to sit on. They had a bed but with no mattress. Mary sat on the floor, her little skinny legs infront of her and her head drooped, she appeared to have a real sadness about her. Mary's elder sister, Irene did very well in primary school, finishing with a score high enough to get her into one of the prestigous government sponsored secondary schools. However, her family have struggled with paying the fees of £100 a term and she was thrown out two weeks ago.

Mary had another sister, Jacinta who was attacked and raped last year. Her injuries were so severe that she died at home two days later; the family had no money to take her to hospital. She was only seven years old. It was a real struggle to hold back the tears when I heard this; I pretended to be consumed in writing the details on my sponsorship paper, but I was keeping my head down until my eyes were dry. I know the slums are insecure and children are vulnerable. I have seen posters around with details of lost children and heard various horror stories, but I had never really though about it with empathy - being abducted, raped or murdered was just another risk to children in Mathare.

Today made me think differently; not only does little Mary have to live with hunger and poverty, sleeping on a concrete floor every night, but she will always carry with her the loss of her sister. We can help her with food and education, we will take her eldest sister into our secondary school, so her parents don't have to worry about fees. My friend and I are going to buy them some mattresses. But we will never be able to remove the injustice that was done to her sister and her family.

On a brighter note; the new kitchen in the school is coming along well and will be well and truly ready for the improved feeding programme to start on Monday 4th October. We plan to maintain the porridge programme and to improve the quality and size of servings of food at lunchtime every day. It won't just be maize and beans day in, day out, there will be meat and fruit too. Now we have secured funding to protect our feeding programme for the next two years, we can work on improving all other aspects of the school and further helping the community it serves.